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Note on Reserve

Is Nature praiseworthy?  Are you glad you were born?

On suffering, Schopenhauer: ‘A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.’

Nature is all there is and, despite science, which I applaud, we’ll never understand it.  So should we praise it?  Praise is not logical discourse but emotional expression.  We needn’t feel constrained by institutions which, to maintain their own power, might tell us it is our duty to glorify.  People who praise Creation because psalms and sutras, gurus and preachers, tell them to, may be living in fear of fellow devotees and ecclesiastical authority.  Not a good reason.

In The Private Life of the Brain the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield holds that the more ecstatic we are the less we are our rational selves.  If praise leads to ecstasy, it might sound like a good thing.  But that is taking us away from a proper contemplation of Nature, which is a matter for the alert mind, not one high on its own endorphins.

All the same, analysis has its limits.  As John Barrow points out in Impossibility, end of chapter 9, ‘… we may find … that what cannot be known is more revealing than what can.’

Praise, private and silent, has nothing to do with knowing.  It comes from our need to please and our capacity for rapture.  The greening and earthing and honesty of praise comes when we include our own pain, assuming that its abundance in the sentient part of Nature has to do with some inevitable way that complex biological systems evolve.  There is no feeling or intention in Nature.  It remains the same whether we praise it or not.

Some poets seemed to have had their praise faculty tuned high at birth.  Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, for instance.  Others are more reserved.  The way I sketch Nature, with its unknowable scaffolding supporting appearances, helps me clear my head, but it’s not easy.  There are difficulties in seeing everything as a unity, as both a One and a Many, to start with.  Praise has to sidestep such problems.  It’s a matter of throwing one’s whole life behind and in support of the existence event, despite the fact that praise is of significance only to oneself.  And for a whole life to be involved, the end of life has to occur.  Only in dying can praise be perfected.

                        … I’m waiting to see how I shall finally feel.

Alan Marshfield

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